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"CINEMA, for me, was a way of surviving the problems of violence and torture during the military dictatorship in Brazil in the 1960s," says Lúcia Murat, 57, journalist and human rights activist. An intense but poised engagement with the changing political and social reality in Brazil distinguishes her film, 'Quase Dois Irmaos' (Almost Brothers), which was in competition for the first International Woman Director's award at the Femme Total Women's Film Festival held in Dortmund (Germany) in April 2005.
Almost Brothers portrays the shared histories of two childhood friends, Miguel and Jorge, the former, a white Senator; the latter, a black drug lord. Early in the film, Miguel visits Jorge in prison to seek his help with a project he wants to pursue for the improvement of the favelas (slums).
While Jorge calmly goes about issuing orders on the cell phone to kill an adversary, he is pessimistic about Miguel's project. The cinematic impact of this scene lingers in the way the narrative underlines the complicity or impotence or both of Brazil's current political system.
Juxtaposing three timelines -- the 1950s, the '70s and contemporary Brazil -- and working, through interweaving flashbacks, Murat shows how the alleged Brazilian melting pot of cultures is soured by the recalcitrant sediments of racism.
In the '50s, the childhood friendship of Miguel and Jorge was fostered by the closeness of their families: Miguel's liberal father admired black culture and the samba music of Jorge's father, a talented, though unsuccessful, composer.
But the military dictatorship of the '70s changed all this by creating a situation in which the leftist revolutionaries ironically helped initiate a civil war and urban violence in Brazil because they found it difficult to share space with the black common criminals in the La Grande prison.
The common prisoners also learned to apply the tactics of the guerrillas to organise the Red Command, which subsequently came to control drug trafficking in the favelas.
How did Murat portray life in the favelas and in prison with such disturbing authenticity? Her own experience as political prisoner in La Grande, she explains, provided the initial impetus. The subsequent making of a documentary in Nicaragua was a necessary step "to find out what my generation was like -- in jail or in exile".
How far is Almost Brothers autobiographical, then? "It was 1968; one was 18 years old and, well, we thought that we were going to take power and that we were going to change the world," says Murat in hindsight. A hard unsparing critical review of such euphoria shines through the film's projection of the dark chapters of the last 50 years of Brazilian history. "This film is mainly about the frustration of a generation that had to fight and is obliged today to deal with a country of inequalities, to deal with violence, to deal with the social world."
Clearly, its chiselled craftsmanship has behind it Murat's experience of making award-winning films like the 1989 'Que Bom Te Ver Viva' (How Nice to See You Alive), which interviews eight women political prisoners who were tortured during the military dictatorship; 'Doces Poderes' (Sweet Power, 1996), an expose of the media's role in directing election results; 'Brava Gente Brasileira' (Brave New Land., 2000), a sharp look at the violent process of colonisation from the viewpoint of the colonised.
Murat has succeeded in writing a script that grippingly and relentlessly holds the two intertwining perspectives in a taut balance. If Miguel is a fictionalised projection of the failed idealism of the middle class of Murat's generation, Paulo Lins -- writer of the famous City of God -- who co-authored the script, has brought through the character of Jorge "the same reality, the same truth from the other side".
Equally important in rendering the black experience credible is that a lot of scenes and all the dialogues were developed during a workshop in which all the actors participated without reading the script.
Miguel's admission in the first scene, "I think we both lost", seems to reverberate in a film that begins and ends with lines from the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa: "We all have two lives/the one we dream of and the other one we live." Does it mean that there is no hope? Although Pessoa is regarded as a great poet of melancholy, Murat explains: "This phrase is much more a phrase that shows the balance of life, and as a balance of life you show the limits of reality."
In contemporary Brazil, in the relationship between Miguel's daughter Juliana and Jorge's son Deley, the tragedy of separation between the 'almost brothers' of the title deepens. For Murat, "the most beautiful thing about the film is that it is about separation, about the tragedy of separation."
Murat declares that the film was made possible because people wanted to work together. "And that is a hope, as the music is a hope." Which is not to say (as the closing song says) that we can live in harmony but that we can try to live in harmony. Murat's next big project is to make a musical with dances about the violence between two gangs in a favela; about the absurdity of violence.
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